bookrblog

The Valleys of the Assassins

Friday, October 17th, 2008 | British Literature | No Comments

I bought this after reading the life of Freya Stark, an adventurer during the mid 20th Century. She was an unusual woman, to say the least, but this memoir of travels through Persia in the 1930s is fascinating, calm, with an undercurrent of humour, and her particular oddness doesn’t come through - which is why it was a bestseller when it was first published.

She travels to search for hidden treasure, for castles, for bronze age graves; she really travels out of curiosity and the sense of freedom she has travelling around. The details of Persia in the 30s are fascinating; the villagers living as they have been for hundreds of years. It certainly underlines how much things have changed in the world over the last hundred years. At the same time a lot of it was familiar to me from my travels to villages in northern Iraq.

This was a quiet, lovely memoir of a place and a time which is so different to life as we experience it here and now.

Finnikin of the Rock

Friday, October 17th, 2008 | Sci-Fi/Fantasy | No Comments

A new book by Melina Marchetta has always heralded great excitement from me. This novel, however, was a completely new direction for Marchetta whose other 3 novels have been teenage coming of age in Sydney books. This is fantasy - grim, violent and very graphic - and it’s just not as good.

Finnikin is a survivor of a great catastrophe in his country, an invasion which led to thousands of deaths and a magical curse meaning no one can go in or out - he happened to be out, so he’s an exile. His mission is to support the exiles (as he’s nobility) and to find the lost prince who will hopefully be able to break the curse. He finds himself linked up instead with an annoying novice who somehow manages to find his father and reunite the exiles. Of course, there’s love and a twist, and a happy ending - happy, if not ecstatic for the torn-apart nation.

Marchetta’s strengths in her previous novels have been the recognition that the reader finds in them - the yes moment as you recall your own teenage years. Being fantasy shouldn’t necessarily mean a sense of unreality hanging over the piece, but that’s what happens here. The country is the usual “fantasy-land” with the map at the front of the book; the place sketched too lightly for recognition, and the horrors too graphic for real connection. As exiles, the relationships - which Marchetta has excelled in previously - are quite convuluted and lack the depth necessary to really respond to them. And because of the graphic nature of the book, I’m not certain if it’s aimed at teens - though the main characters are teens - or adults.

This book really didn’t work for me, which is a pity, because I’ve always loved Marchetta before.

The Comfort of Saturdays

Saturday, October 11th, 2008 | British Literature | No Comments

 The comfort of reading a new Isabel Dalhousie book by Alexander McCall Smith! This has all the usual elements – Isabel rambling on in her head about all sorts of topics, a mystery that isn’t ever really a mystery but just a chance to think about ethics (in this case a doctor who falsified findings about a drug), and a little development in the complex relationships which surround Isabel – her young lover, her baby, her housekeeper and her niece. As usual the mystery isn’t particularly well put together or pulled apart, and the story isn’t exactly resolved (I was a little confused about the Eddie subplot), but it is still so utterly satisfying in its elements that I have to put it down after each chapter just to savour it all. McCall Smith is gently probing a good human being, an intelligent human being, and that is so interesting that it is worth pretty much all the other books I read put together.

The Farm School series

Friday, October 10th, 2008 | Children's Literature | No Comments

Annis in Exile, Cherry Tree Perch, and Strangers at the Farm School are the three books in the 1920s Girls School Story series by Josephine Elder. Of course they’re out of print and only available second-hand by searching, but as someone who really enjoys school stories from that era, they’re worth the search. They’re historically interesting - alternative schools and their values in that between war period - and they are a good read, making you want to find your own cherry tree and pony to ride! They’re the kind of book you would want children to read because the kids are so self sufficient, except - there’s the subplot of Kenneth, the “idiot”. Very enlightened for the time, but a bit cringe-worthy now. However, again, historically really interesting.

A Company of Swans

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 | British Literature | No Comments

 I wrote about another book of Eva Ibbotson that there were some hints of plagiarism in it – regarding Harry Potter, although hers was published first – but this one is directly plagiarised from a book that I read as a teen – the plot is identical. A girl escapes her loveless home by joining a dance company; finds herself in South America and falls for a man there – has certain adventures but her innocence and originality win out and she marries the guy who turns out to be a lord or something. Silly teenaged stuff, written effectively (more effectively than the book she stole the ideas from!) but very old fashioned. Of course, there’s many authors now who plagiarise – even Jostein Gaarder took ideas from Ravi Tagore – and they mostly call it “homage”, albeit without admitting their sources until accused. I’m not certain how much it matters, especially in this case where it’s a rather silly book that won’t last any longer than the silly book on which it’s based.

The Painted Veil

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | British Literature | No Comments

I saw the film of this book by W Somerset Maugham and thought it rather shallow; the book is quite different, a character study rather than a historical snapshot. A girl marries a man she doesn’t love in order to escape a loveless home; bored, she has an affair and when her husband finds out, he takes them both to a cholera-infested area of China (Hong Kong in the book) in hopes she’ll die. It has a similar effect (although he’s the one who dies); she realises how petty and meaningless her past life had been – how petty even the affair was.

It almost works, but I felt the end petered out as though even he didn’t know what to do with it. It might have been more effective if she’d failed and had gone back to a relationship with the man she learned to despise. But it’s not as shallow as the film and it’s a good character study – I can see that it would have shocked people back in the early 20s, although it was certainly heralding a new time for women.

Horned Pigeon

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | British Literature | No Comments

This is the first memoir by George Millar about his war experiences, although he wrote it after Maquis I believe. It hasn’t been republished; I had to really search to find this second-hand. It’s interesting, because it’s so honest. Millar joins up because he wants in on the excitement of WW2, although he’s already a war correspondent. His wife is very upset about it. Off he goes to North Africa and quickly gets captured, sent to Italy and then Germany, from one rotten POW camp to the next, hungry, bored, and desperate to escape. He does so, heads to France and Paris and wanders around trusting the mercy of one person to the next, knowing that if captured those kind people would be tortured and killed. His actual escape from France to Spain is almost a comedy in its absurdity. And then he comes home to find his wife no longer faithful to him.

It’s certainly not a hero’s story. He doesn’t do anything heroic; no one really does, apart from all the French people who refuse to betray him. But they’re aware that they’d be knocked off by the resistance if they did, too. It’s a story of people, of strange characters and odd situations; the man whose one conversation is about fat, the woman in the French underground with her expensive make-up case, the prisoners who wall themselves into their castle prison. What a time. This is an almost rambling tale but it’s probably a far more accurate picture of it all than say The Great Escape.

Bel Canto

Monday, October 6th, 2008 | American Literature | No Comments

This eminently readable novel by Ann Patchett is a bit of a mystery to me. Apparently she wrote it because she thought the siege in Peru was operatic, and yet she’d never seen an opera before nor had any interest in operatic music. Well, whatever the truth of it, it’s a story about a group of (bumbling) terrorists who take over a government building in an unnamed country where a world-famous opera singer is performing (however many of the details such as the Japanese characters derive from the Peruvian siege). The music that follows in the days of the siege brings out the best in the terrorists and the hostages and links them together until it all comes to a sticky end - of course.

It is more of a fairy-tale than a story (as in most operas I suppose) and even verges on silliness in some ways. The terrorists are rarely terrifying, and the hostages are calm, and there’s no real fear or foreboding in the siege, just a tinge of boredom. The music touches every soul - there’s not a tone-deaf one of them! - and of course love blossoms. The coda mystified me altogether.

Well written, if not inspired, and certainly a page-turner; but nothing particularly original or true.

Books Over a Year

Sunday, October 5th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

After I lost my password for BookrBlog, I wasn’t able to keep writing reviews, so here’s a list instead of the books I have read since then. (Obviously, they’re not all the books I read in the last year; I’ve also had textbooks for my course, books I’ve re-read such as the entire “Little House on the Prairie” series, and books that were so bad that I wouldn’t want to record their existence.) I’ll keep up with writing reviews as I read after this. The books below aren’t in any order; just as I remember them, that’s all; I’ve starred the really good ones.

1. A Friend Like Henry: a nonf about a boy with ASD and his dog.
2. Dear Gabriel: a nonf story in letters from a Dad who is a writer to his son with ASD. *****
3. The Other Country: a nonf story by a Dad about his son with ASD.
4. Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks: a nonf about love of music.
5. The Brain that Changes Itself: a nonf about brain plasticity
6. The Boy who was Raised as a Dog: a nonf about treating childhood trauma
7. The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers: a political thriller that predicted WW1
8. Silence: a Japanese novel about the persecution of Christians last century
9. Shipwrecked: a Japanese novel about a poor village of shipwreckers
10. The Wheel on the School: Children’s Lit about a village in Holland, simple and beautiful
11. Grandfather’s Dance: Children’s Lit in the “Sarah Plain and Tall” series
12. Euclid’s Elements: I haven’t finished this, am getting through it one proposition at a time, but how can geometry be so fascinating and exciting? I can actually feel the lines in my head as I look and read and imagine this guy who discovered what you did to one triangle could work for a different looking triangle and a big one and a small one and … *****
13. Euclid in the Rainforest: a mathematician talks about how he found mathematics everywhere he went, travelling all over the world and discussing Pythagoras with shepherds and mayors and weird millionaires on the Mediterranean
14. Slow Journey South: a Australian nonf about a woman who is walking through Africa
15. My Reading Life by Bob Carr, his discussion of books he’s read, interesting but a little weird
16. The Survivor by Tom Keneally, an old novel I found, good but strange, about Antarctica and university politics
17. The Grass is Singing, a sad novel about South Africa
18. Einstein – biography by Michel White and John Gribben; maybe it was Autism or something like it – he was an odd man, that’s for sure
19. The Last Station – a novel about Tolstoy – I didn’t really like this
20. Night Fires by Joan Lingard, Children’s Lit
21. Nim’s Island, Australian children’s lit, better than the movie
22. And When Did You Last See Your Father? – This was sad but fascinating –
23. Saturnalia by Lindsay Davis, I loved her early books, now they’re all the same
24. Princess Academy, children’s lit, different fairytale
25. The Secret History by Donna Tartt – very interesting and frightening and full of drugs but are there really people like this in the 21^st century?
26. A Spoonful of Jam by Michelle Magorian, pretty good children’s lit about post ww2
27. A Fine and Private Place by Peter – it was all right, not brilliant, a fantasy
28. On Chesil Beach – initially I liked it – it was readable – but what was it trying to say? It was empty
29. October, a novel by Richard B Wright, I have no recollection of this so it can’t have been brilliant
30. The Morning Gift – very readable but mixed quality – children’s lit
31. A Mighty Heart – the sad true story of the woman whose husband got killed in Pakistan – but she did not do much
32. Gwen’s Story – this was quiet and interesting children’s lit pre ww2
33. The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West – exceptional novel, so powerful and so different *****
34. The World According to Garp – brilliant and strange like Catch 22 but with less heart maybe
35. DragonMaster Series by Christ Bunch – utter crap fantasy
36. White Tiger/Dragon series by Kylie Chan – fantasy started off well and went downhill fast
37. The Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – fantastic, beautiful and funny novel about the Nazi occupation of the Jersey Isles *****
38. Annis’ Exile – the first in the Farm School series – historically interesting children’s lit
39. The Silver Donkey – Australian children’s lit about ww1 – fairly ordinary
40. The Epic of Gilgamesh – totally surprising, so different from Beowulf, so beautiful and fascinating *****
41. The Trivium – having read “Zen and the art of Motorcyle M.” I realise that this is what he was complaining about – bits and pieces-y
42. Fatherland – really, a bit silly – why would someone living in that society by shocked by death?
43. Freya Stark: Passionate Nomad – an amazing life, sad in many ways, strange but incredible woman
44. Gertrude Bell: some other Nomad – see above, but even more incredible as she was earlier in history
45. Sequel to Ex Libris – not as good, quite mixed actually
46. The Uncommon Reader – I quite liked this, very British – but disliked his other two stories (All They Stood Up In/ Van Woman) – bit of a snob
47. Maquis – the absolutely incredible story of this British guy during WW2 – I only found out about him because of a cool book I picked up for 20c about him sailing through Europe post ww2, no idea he was a full on secret agent guy – really freaky
48. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Gold – this was ok, historically very interesting but wasn’t particularly deep – man did women have it tough
49. Making the Cut: Surgeon’s Stories - a series of very moving stories based on truth by a Sydney surgeon - very well written, moving, and insightful about the current health system
50. The Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik – brilliant fantasy series involving dragons and the Napoleonic war – first one the best, the fifth the worst but still ok, and she’s keeping on keeping on – one of the best fantasy series I’ve read in a while *****

 For some reason Wordpress is eating the numbers; there’s fifty all up, anyway.